Northern rock

THE demand for more housing in the south-east is one symptom of the population drift from the north of England to the more prosperous south, where jobs are relatively plentiful. But it is not only the people who are migrating southwards. The streets and roads of the towns and cities of the north are also moving south piece by piece.

The cobbled streets and natural stone paving, which once echoed to armies of clog-wearing workers, are now in demand by the construction industry of the south. Newly cut stone is available, but takes a hundred years of wear to achieve the distressed patina builders and architects prefer.

Prices for these worn chunks of rock have rocketed. York-stone paving as it is called now sells for £30 a square yard in the north, and is sold on at a hefty profit when it arrives at its destination. Dealers scour the streets looking for new supplies, asking innocent householders if they would like to sell their garden path, or the paving from the back yard, even offering to replace it with its modern equivalent; concrete, coloured and moulded to look like natural stone.

In the dead of night thieves lift whole pavements from residential streets. In Liverpool an entire street was stripped of its cobbles by a gang posing as legitimate workmen. In Huddersfield thieves stripped a street of its paving, but were caught before they could carry it off. The council replaced it with tarmac; the original stones were just too valuable to be replaced.

The boom in stone prices shows no sign of stopping. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Buy rock: they aren't making it anymore.”